John Robinson blogs about the top 10 journalistic gifts he’d like to see for Christmas. Let’s see if I can summarize them in two words or less each:

1. Participation
2. Civility
3. Relevance
4. No Fear
5. Experimentation
6. Equipment
7. Performance=Promise
8. $100 computers
9. Accessible Style
10. Free WiFi!

Obviously, you’ll have to check his blog to see what each of those cryptic phrases means. In the Christmas spirit, let me add a few for college media. These are big wishes, so I’m limiting my list to five:

1. That every web editor be promoted to the equivalent of the managing editor for news (at least). If we want to get serious about doing journalism in an online environment, then we have to have a commitment in the structure of student news staffs. This sends that signal. It’s a start.
2. That we move beyond shovelware. Even this late in the game, there are far too many colleges who throw content online that was ripped straight from the pages of the printed edition. Reporters need to learn linking skills, and a new way of story construction (see Mindy McAdams’ excellent post today on that very topic).
3. That every reporter become multimedia literate. Whether it’s handling a digital still camera, capturing audio with a digital audio recorder or shooting video, the cub reporters need this training when they start their careers in student media. And we can also show them how to put those multimedia bits into digital stories that extend their printed words.
4. That college newspapers become college news communities. Connected with a move away from shovelware, I’d like to see a commitment to beefing up the community aspects of the news site. It’s hard to build a community with a piece of paper. While it may not be easy to do so with an online news site, it’s worth a shot. What a great thing it would be if student newspapers became one of the few sites students automatically visited every day to see what’s going on and participate in the conversation about their campuses.
5. That we all become centers for innovation. College student media is filled with bright, creative, intelligent and rabble-rousing individuals. It’s my dream that they turn a good deal of that energy toward their online products and start creating initiatives, products, and efforts that have industry folks coming to college campus media to see how it’s done. The tools are there.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 11:14 am and is filed under Community, Multimedia views, hope for the future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.